by: Karl Long
I read a great article in the SF Bay Guardian written by Annalee Newitz who blogs at techsploitation.com (awesome name). Anyway, the article is called And the real anonymous trolls online are . . . . In this article she skewers the very un-anonymous troll Andrew Keen, who’s been crying about how the internets is undermining his word view of authority and modernity (maybe he should check out Bioshock).
Anyway, this is a rather round about way to talk about a tool called wikiscanner which basically looks up the ip address of any anonymous edits on wikipedia and then looks up what organization owns that ip address. The result, lots of egg on government and corporation faces. With Pepsi editing some of the negative health effects of diet pepsi, to exxon adjusting the size of past oil spills, or wal-mart changing facts about their wages. Some of these edits actually reveal some stewardship of course like Pixar editing the Shrek 4 entry to reflect that it was a Dreamworks Animation and not Pixar.
All of these gems were taken from the Wired reddit list of most salacious wikipedia anonymous edits
If you’re a company that doesn’t have a wikipedia policy get one now.
Relate see my article on uncommon uses for the wiki
Original Post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/anonymous-edits-to-wikipedia-revealed-through-wikiscanner
Jabo,
It seems to me that you are taking sides in this dispute and would like us to take sides in this as well.
After looking into this briefly, I found two things:
1. The editor, 'Griot', has been banned forever from Wikipedia for gross misconduct
2. Mary Spicuzza was not 'fired'. She handed in her notice to join another company before she even wrote the article.
I think we should leave it at that.
SK
I'd be interested in your take on a famous Wikipedia episode from last winter. Mary Spicuzza, a print journalist, upset because she thought an article about her sister Jeanne Marie Spicuzza was unfairly dropped from Wikipedia, conducted a campaign to "out" the Wikipedia editor whom she thought wronged her sister. She wrote an article explaining how she tried to out him. You can read it here:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2008-02-13/news/wikipedia-idiots-the-edit-wars-of-san-francisco/
However, she was forced to resign from her newspaper, the SF Weekly, for using newspaper resources for "personal reasons." She also violated several journalistic rules, including using sources in her family without revealing as such to readers.
You can read an interesting take on the matter by the editor she tried to "out" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive372#Attempted_Outing_of_Wikipedia_Editor_User:Griot_by_Tawdry_Tabloid_Journalist
Wikipedia just keeps getting more interesting....